I love #Spring on #cape cod The beautiful dune Daisys bloom in early spring and brighten my days!

#BuyIntoArt #SpringForArt #SpringIntoArt #AYearForArt #Photography #MastoArt #mastodon #FediArt #FediGiftShop #GiftThemArt #Beach #Flowers

Full image and more here: https://pixels.com/featured/beach-dune-daisys-lorri-m-barry-photography.html

Hopped off the shuttle at Yaki point for sunset.
#NativeLand #GrandCanyon #Sunset #Landscape #Photography

sometimes I come home with leaves and petals in my hair. maybe spiders. I like spring. #photography

Judge Wyndham's Oak is well documented to be 1000 years old and it's still putting out new leaves and buds #treesofmastdon #veterantrees #silentsaturday #oak #veteranoak #dorset #tree

We have a couple of daffodils in our yard. I'm not sure how they got here. So pretty. #Gardening @plants

Cave Sunset

2023-02-24/25 day 252/253 of doing art every day for a year (mostly – I took sick days off). 

I followed a Joel Create tutorial.

For more info, follow this link: https://lmashton.com/cave-sunset/

#ArtMatters #AYearForArt #Procreate #DigitalArt #WomensArt #ArtistsOnMastodon
A digital painting. Viewed from…

Pink Tree

2023-02-22/23 day 250/251 of doing art every day for a year (mostly – I took sick days off). 

This was a Joel Create tutorial. If you watch the timelapse, you will see that I change my mind a fair bit and redo things. I change the leaves entirely at least three times until I was happy. I’m sure there are faster, more efficient ways to get things done, but I am not there yet. 😀

For more info, follow this link: https://lmashton.com/pink-tree/

#ArtMatters #AYearForArt #Procreate #DigitalArt #WomensArt #ArtistsOnMastodon
A digital painting of a tree wi…

A striking visualisation of #climatechange: the date of Kyoto cherry blossoms' reaching full bloom, plotted over the past 1000 years.

Thanks to the cultural significance of cherry blossoms in Japan, we have data on the specific day of the year when a very particular species of cherry blossom (P. jamasakura) reached "full-flowering" (満開) in a specific area on the outskirts of Kyoto (Arashiyama), all the way back to 800 AD.

The trend of the past 50 years is hard to miss…

Happy to share the early online version of our new study (#OpenAccess): https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/acc81a

We use #machinelearning to detect the emergence of distinguishable climate patterns in a new model experiment simulating stratospheric aerosol injection relative to a moderate future emissions scenario.

I have a summary of the paper at https://zacklabe.com/climate-signals-and-explainable-ai/. More on this all soon! #OpenScience #SciComm

Various Cladonia lichen and moss landscape among rocks

#lichen #LichenSubscribe #moss #Mosstodon #LichenLandscape

Google employees are known as ‘Googlers’. New employees are ‘Nooglers’ and dogs that come to work with their owners are ‘Dooglers.

@AngelaPreston The wife and I both loved, “The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild” on the Switch 🙂 The great thing about the Switch for us was that we could take the game with us anywhere and play anywhere. But as we get older and eye-sight becomes weaker, the handhelds just don’t work for us 😛

Similarly, we loved the Xbox back in the day when the Kinect was there because we could do active gaming without controllers — like play tennis or bowling. But sadly, they discontinued the Kinect and so it isn’t as compelling to us now.

The other thing that we love about the PlayStation, that I forgot to mention, is that it seems to have more couch co-op games. Sure, couch co-op doesn’t seem to be that popular generally, but we love it since that allows us to play together with two controllers and on the same TV screen and that’s a huge draw for us 🙂

@AngelaPreston I’m fairly certain that switching to a controller would help you too (and definitely not advocating for switching over to consoles) 🙂 Perhaps you can get a controller from Amazon so that you can try it out and if it isn’t to your liking, you can return it?

I believe what helps the most (at least for me) is that I have something solid to hold on to which gives my palm support and not have my fingers arched over the keyboard. But of course, YMMV.

As far as consoles go, I think my favourite is the PlayStation but that’s mostly historical since that is the first console that I really loved. I have owned/used all three of the current main consoles — Xbox, Nintendo Switch, and PlayStation and I keep coming back to the PlayStation. But that’s also partially due to it having some of my favourite games like the “Horizon” series and the “Uncharted” series ….

@AngelaPreston I started playing PC games over 30 years ago and using the keyboard always felt very cramped and difficult to me, especially when it came to doing various combos.

When I started using a controller and playing console games (about 20 years ago possibly), I realized that the controller was so much easier to use and my fingers didn’t feel so cramped.

Unfortunately, I’ve never used a controller for PC games since I switched to mostly console-only game play once I got into console gaming. Sure, I’d occasionally play a PC game but most of these were very much mouse-clicking type of games. So other than sharing the fact that I felt a controller was easier than the keyboard, I’m afraid that I don’t have anything much to offer 🙂

In the 1800s, some people tried to disguise toilets as stacks of books (Image: FrDr; CC BY-SA).

Mathematically, I'm most interested in #NumberTheory (years ago did some research related to #ContinuedFractions). I love the numbers #phi, #pi, and #e, and the various days celebrating them! I enjoy #geometry and #discretemath recreationally too. CS/engineering-wise, I'm most interested in #ai #artificialintelligence and #MachineLearning, #robotics and #automation, #Android #appdev, #cybersecurity, #softwaredevelopment, and more!

Andy Weir's The Martian astronaut (supposedly a botanist), played by Matt Damon, almost starved due to a misunderstanding of #potato #propagation. He waited for his #garden's first crop to make tubers before starting the next generation when, instead, he could have taken stem cuttings, or even leaf cuttings, and made hundreds of new plants.
Of course that would have killed the dramatic tension.
Learn plant propagation. It can save lives, AND it's not f*cking rocket science. /end rant
#permaculture #ScienceFiction

#silentSunday ferns on tree (also one for #mosstadon )

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/alighodsi_hello-dolly-democratizing-the-magic-of-chatgpt-activity-7045014694385917952-JUVH?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop "We are open sourcing Dolly, a ChatGPT-like model that can do instruction following, brainstorming, summarization. The remarkable thing is that we created it for $30 using one server for 3 hours on a small dataset using a 2 year old open source LLM model. The secret in magical human-like interactivity probably lies in a small dataset, not huge models, not training for 100,000 GPU hours." #StochasticParrots #LLM #MachineLearning

I’ve been writing quite a bit about Indian movies recently. This is mostly because I get up early in the morning these days and am trying to get through my backlog of movies and a lot of them are Indian movies.

Speaking of which, I watched “Writer Padmabhushan” (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt15341106) yesterday and I was entranced 🙂 It was funny, heartfelt, and very, very interesting.

I loved most of the cast but especially, the actors who played the parents of the protagonist — Rohini and Ashish Vidyarthi.

Now anybody who watches Indian movies probably knows Ashish Vidyarthi. He generally plays corrupt cops, or villains. But here he plays a loving and supporting father and it was a joy to watch his performance.

Perhaps I have a soft-spot for actors who generally play villains who play a loving parent/support role, but this was like watching Amrish Puri in “Gardish” (or “Muskurahat”) or Anupam Kher in “Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge” or Jagapathi Babu in “Father Chitti Umaa Karthik” … It’s a special kind of joy watching these actors transform 🙂

But, back to the movie. Again, it might be personal preferences, but I do love well-told stories about writers (and maybe writing). This was such a story. It’s about the protagonists need to be known as a writer and his journey in actually getting there but with some interesting (and emotional) twists and turns.

#Movies #MinReview #Telugu